Michael Hartl

About Michael Hartl

I grew up in Southern California, taking for granted that sometimes the February weather makes wearing shorts a necessity. I then headed east for college, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University (which, somewhat confusingly, means that I attended Harvard College). I lived in the house formerly known as North, and I worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. During the summer, I SURFed at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

After college, I spent a year studying chaos theory at the University of Maryland, and then I returned to Caltech to get a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. While at Tech, I was an instructor in the physics core curriculum, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000.

I became interested in entrepreneurship while in graduate school, so after finishing my degree I spent a year splitting my time between postdoctoral research and starting a company with my long-time friend Sumit Daftuar (also of Harvard and Caltech). The company Sumit and I started, Quark Sports, applied our strong quantitative and computer skills to create (of all things) unique weekly fantasy sports games in football, basketball, and baseball. In the year following my postdoc, I worked full-time developing the Quark Sports website, as well as creating BracketManager, the leading independent NCAA Basketball Tournament site. During this time I also served as an editor for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition, an update to the all-time best-selling physics lectures.

Quark Sports successfully built a core of enthusiastic and loyal customers, but our need for additional funding, combined with the risky legal environment created by litigious players unions, led to our decision to shut down in 2005. I then spent the better part of a year writing a web development tutorial book with Aurelius Prochazka called RailsSpace.

In December 2007 I moved to Silicon Valley to work on the Insoshi open-source social networking platform with my friend Long Nguyen as part of the Winter 2008 Y Combinator program. Insoshi had some notable successes, including becoming one of the most popular forked repositories at GitHub, and nearly raised a significant sum of money in October '08 before the market tanked. Unfortunately, we were ultimately unable to secure funding, so we shut down the business end of Insoshi in early 2009, though happily the Insoshi open-source project lives on.

These days I live in Pasadena near Caltech, where I am involved in a large number of on-campus and alumni activities (including the Glee Club, the SURF speaking competition and board of directors, and the Gnome Club). I am the author of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book and video screencast series, the leading introduction to web development with Ruby on Rails, which has been both a critical and commercial success. I'm also the founder of Tau Day and author of The Tau Manifesto, which argues that the true circle constant is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius, not to its diameter. Conceived principally as a social hack, Tau Day and the number τ = C/r have struck a chord (sometimes literally), leading to multiple newspaper, TV, and radio interviews, and hundreds of thousands of web hits.

In my free time, I enjoy reading, choral and a cappella singing, Krav Maga, and working on my four-step plan for world domination.